I have been told this is possible by using a Vocoder and a small amount of reverb to finish it up. So I have been playing around with Fruity Loops Vocoder and trying a ton of presets but I keep ending up with robotic samples, so i'm rather unsure whether I need a vocoder or not.

If it is an Vocoder I need, is there some particular trick to find out what the carrier should be to end up with this voice, and are there any suggested settings to remove the robotic aspect of a Vocoder?

If it's not a Vocoder, what is it that I could use to achieve this result?

4 Answers
4

This sounds very much like the MicroKorg vocoder but most vocoders will sound similar. There's a lot of free ones out there that will do the same thing.

I would recreate it by recording the vocoder processing and the dry unprocessed dialogue at the same time on 2 separate tracks as the mix is mostly dry. The vocoder doesn't have any note change, it's just one key held down or left open.

Alternatives: I agree with Jeff on the impulse response route. There's a few free IR plugins out there and you can usually get free IR presets too if you don't want to do it yourself.

Alternatively you could process one leg with a flange plugin (again one leg incredibly wet/processed) and slow the LFO down until it sounds similar to this

The Vocoders I use are the built in Ableton Live, and NI Razors vocoder.The way I would try to recreate this particular sound is by first recording your dialogue, then maybe duplicating the track and pitching it up followed by throwing a vocoder on it. Maybe even playing with a filter, an Eq, and blending the tracks together.

You could also playback your dialogue while recording it through a PVC pipe or record the impulse response of your coffee pot and dropping that on your track. The sample sounds slightly like the guy may be breathing threw some sort of head gear, there are allot of ways to approach getting this close but that's how I would recreating the sound.

Granted I haven't heard this in high quality, my guess is based on what I can hear here, and I don't think it's vocoder at all as far as I can tell. I think it's a series of extremely short delays, each with a little detuning, just a few milliseconds, possibly analogue. If you want the lofi-feel of this recording, you can add for example bit-crushers or similar, though I think this is recorded from a TV-set on a not very good recorder.

I use short delays of different kinds for a lot of stuff, but though I haven't really used several delays simultaneously on one sound-part so far, I have not needed to yet, my old trusty JUNO-60 does indeed get very much this characteristic when played in Synchronous mode, which means all 6 voices are played at once at equal strength! As for the original recording, as it does have a pretty present though distorted low-end, I have a sneaking suspicion it is recorded with extreme proximity through a good cardioid. It might do the trick with several pitch-shifters set to just a few cents as well.